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# What If You Don’t Need All the Answers?
- URL: https://thetelepathiccounterrevolution.ghost.io/the-sleight-of-hand/
- Published: 2026-08-13T21:45:13.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-15T15:45:31.000Z
- Description: To say "all is impermanent" is already to make a conclusion. The freedom is not that beginnings and endings disappear, but that the mind no longer has to possess them. Let knowledge arrive and depart. The illusion is the invisible "taking" by which we imagine something traveled between us.
- Author: Chase McQuade
- Tags: #Buddhism, #Dhamma, #Mindfulness, #AwakeningThroughSchizophrenia, #Enlightenment, #BuddhaNature, #MiddleWay, #Actuality, #Suffering, #Nirvana, #Wisdom, #EgoDeath, #Impermanence, #Illusion, #Awareness, #Christian, #CosmicWisdom, #KnowledgeAndWisdom

**Impermanence and Illusion: A Mind Without Conclusions**  
*By Chase McQuade*

I would like to begin this discussion in utmost sincerity and seriousness. I have seen endless, cyclical debates about the illusion that Buddhism points toward, and with it, the notion of impermanence. I believe a terrible misconception has settled around these ideas. They have become generalized abstractions, repeated with predetermined conclusions, often without the discussion that might reveal what we have actually understood.

Impermanence is a profound understanding. Intellectually, something of it can be seen. To live what it implies is another matter entirely. Then there is illusion. We hear this word everywhere, even in the declaration that all of this is an illusion. But what are we saying? What have we understood, and what have we merely accepted?

Allow me a moment to examine these concepts. At the very least, you will have something to ask the next person who claims to have settled them.

Let us begin with impermanence. The word means that something lasts for a limited period of time; it does not last forever. People will say, “Look about you. Look at yourself within the world. Look even at the world itself. It is all impermanent. It will inevitably vanish.” But there is a trap in the way we accept this statement, and I believe that trap brings us directly to the question of illusion.

First, look briefly at thought. The thinking process has always been a marvel to me. Consider it as a mechanism of contradiction, something that has been with us from the beginning. I can say, “Yes, I know,” and there may be little more to think about. But then I say, “I will think about this.” What has happened? Something has come before what I already know, and I have not yet resolved the encounter.

Someone offers an argument, and I answer, “I need to think about this.” I am holding their statement against what I have learned, what I have experienced, what I already understand. There is a contradiction to consider. Hold this simple observation for a moment, and let us return to impermanence.

To say that everything is impermanent, and then hold that understanding as permanent, is already a contradiction. Yet the mind may accept the statement as though the contradiction has already been examined. “Everything is impermanent.” There. I have thought about it. I have brought it to a resolution. Now I have reached a conclusion. I have found something I intend to keep, and the understanding I am keeping is that nothing can be kept.

Notice the sleight of hand. The mind accepts the term as a conclusion while overlooking what the term would ask of that very conclusion. The statement seems to carry its own contemplation, and so we accept it as though we have already done the thinking. But accepting a contradiction is not the same as resolving it. This is how a misconception can pass for an understanding.

Let me explain what I mean by permanence within time. There is a beginning to a life, and there is an end. There is sickness, suffering, and death. These are the conditions I am considering when I speak of what the Buddha encountered. But notice that a beginning and an ending establish an occurrence within time. It happened. What became of it may change, but that it happened remains.

In this sense, even the statement that something has ended gives it a permanence within time. Its ending does not undo its occurrence. I am using permanence here to speak of its having happened, rather than its lasting forever. We observe what occurs within time, but what we observe has still occurred. If it had never occurred, there would be no occurrence to call permanent or impermanent.

Now we arrive at the philosophical question: does the mind occur? If the mind occurs within time, then, by this understanding, it too has a permanence within time. There is its beginning, its movement, its encounter with sickness, age, and death. You see? These are the conditions we recognize. I know that I am within time. Since I happened, since I occurred, I will always have occurred within it.

How, then, does the mind transcend this? How can I recognize these conditions and still question whether they are the conclusion of the mind? What is the realization that could resolve this contradiction?

If the mind seeks an answer, the answer becomes another conclusion. “I came to a conclusion.” Now that, too, has happened within time. It seeks a beginning, and there is something that must become. It seeks an ending, and there is something that must be brought to an end. The seeking arrives at what it sought, only to find itself established once again within time. We call this understanding. We might even call it freedom. But look at what the mind has done. It has found another place to remain.

What of a mind without conclusions? What of a mind that has resolved its conclusions without holding another in their place? Without beginnings, without the demand for answers, without becoming? It is difficult enough to consider no conclusions. Even more difficult to consider no beginnings. If this mind encounters a conclusion, even an answer, it can do away with it. It need not make a place for itself there.

And yet you still live a life, mind you. You still live a life. Your life continues within time. The body has its occurrence within time, but how would you establish the existence of a mind that offers no conclusion of itself? To establish it would be to give it a beginning, an ending, a doing or an undoing. Already you would have given it something it does not hold.

The question is how to free the mind from this demand of existence: that everything within it must resolve into something, must begin, must end; that every looking must finish with something found, and everything lost must be given a location.

A mind that holds no conclusion does not have a conclusion of itself. Notice what I am saying. It does not arrive at “This is what I am” and then make an exception of that understanding. It does not conclude that it has become a mind without conclusions. That would be another becoming, another answer carried into time.

This is the understanding of impermanence I am pointing toward. The mind has done away with the conclusions, answers, and questions through which it continually establishes its own occurrence. It does not hold them. It has no conclusion to defend, no beginning from which it must become something further. It perceives without fixing what it perceives into another place to remain. There is resolution, but no conclusion kept as a possession. From this purity of perception comes the understanding that it is all impermanent.

Consider the wisdom such a mind would require. To encounter it, your life would be completely open to it. Whatever conclusion you had drawn, this mind would be able to dissolve. For the rest of us, our minds are occurring in the world, our bodies are moving along just fine, and within the meaning of time I have described, we are permanent within it.

Perhaps you can see that, to experience this impermanence, you would have to do away with the demand for an experience. The moment you say, “Now I have experienced it,” there is something you have taken, something you can return to and call your own. The mind has found its answer again. And here we begin to encounter attachment. Now you are in the experience.

Another expression I hear is the middle road. I believe this, too, can become a misconception. Even teachings attributed to the Buddha can be received through the very confusion they are meant to address. When I consider the middle road, I picture the darkness of deep meditation and the light of the world when the eyes open. There is the inward stillness, and there is the life one continues to live. To keep one's balance between them, without making either the final answer, is how I approach this image. You remain in the world. You do not have to bring the world to a conclusion in order to live within it.

But what is the attachment that keeps bringing us back to conclusions? What happens between the mind and that from which it takes an answer?

I am observing the world. I am not required to draw a conclusion from everything I observe. I am not required to answer it. Yet an inquiry appears: Where am I? What am I doing? Who am I to be here? I was observing, and now there is something I believe must be answered. How did that demand appear?

Look at the magician. Suddenly he pulls a rabbit from a hat, and there is applause. But the applause is not simply for the rabbit. It is for the appearing of the rabbit, for what the audience cannot account for. Something happened that they did not see. The rabbit is before them; the sleight of hand is not.

This is what I am calling illusion: the unseen movement within the appearing of an appearance. Consider the flowers in the magician's hand. The magician stands before you. The flowers are there. Yet something has passed unnoticed between their absence and their appearance, and now there is praise, there is applause. When you say, “There is the illusion,” what are you pointing to? The flowers? The hand? The magician? Pointing at what has appeared does not reveal how it appeared.

Let us consider a more familiar experience. When you are dreaming, I mean when you are asleep, in bed, what is happening while you witness the dream? You may say you are participating in it. You are within its circumstances, following its story, understanding what happens next. Yet you are still the dreamer of the dream. It continues from one moment to another, and with each moment you take an understanding of what you are witnessing.

We are looking for the invisible movement within the appearance of the dream, and within the appearance of you as someone in it. I witness the dream and gain an understanding of it, even an understanding of my place within it. Then it is as though the dream takes that understanding back into its story. It gains clarity, movement, direction. There seems to be a point to it now, and my understanding of that point carries my participation forward.

This is difficult to see because the movement I am describing passes unnoticed. I take an understanding from the dream, and the dream seems to gain something from what I have taken. Now it has more to work with, and I feel I understand more of it. We seem to grow together. Dreams can be incredible narcissists, the best at it, by the way. “Because of you, I behave like this.” From the dream comes the appearing of you, and from the appearing of you comes the next movement of the dream.

Suppose, while participating, I say, “Enough of this absurdity. I will not have any of this,” and the dream comes to an end. Consider that ending through the exchange I have described: I am no longer supplying the participation through which the story continued. Here, too, is my objection to treating lucid dreaming as freedom from illusion. If I remain occupied with directing the dream, what has become of my attachment to it? I may have changed my part in the story without resolving the exchange.

Consider thirst and a cup. Pause before you conclude that everything about the drink is contained in the cup. The body is thirsty, and the drink will meet a real need. But watch the movement around that need. I reach for the cup. I lift it to drink, and through my reaching, the cup is moved. I could say that I take nourishment from the cup and the cup takes its movement from me.

You would rightly object that the cup takes nothing. It has no intention of taking anything from me. Exactly. The cup moves because I move it. Yet look at how easily participation can be described as one thing taking from another, as though both were growing through the exchange. The cup is not growing. I receive the drink; the cup receives its movement through my hand. This is a description of the interaction, not an intention belonging to the cup.

But do you notice the whole interaction? Or do you simply notice that you have received nourishment? The cup can become almost invisible to your attention. You register what you have gained while the movement through which you gained it passes unnoticed. This is where I am asking you to look: at the appearing of the nourishment through the interaction, and at what disappears from our attention once we have taken our understanding of it.

Return to the magician. The flowers have appeared. You can point to them, but the flowers alone do not account for their appearing. In the same way, I am not saying that you are an illusion. I am asking about the appearing, about the movement within the encounter, and about what we take from it.

There are two people in a restaurant. One is the waiter, and the other is the customer. The waiter presents a menu. The menu represents food, but there is no meal upon the page. Between these two people there is now an understanding to be reached. The customer asks questions. The waiter explains. Through their interaction, one acts more fully as the waiter and the other as the customer. Their words, expressions, and expectations gather around what lies between them.

Once the order is understood, the waiter leaves and the customer waits. The menu has led to an expectation, and that expectation points toward another encounter. The food arrives. Hunger is to be satisfied. The waiter moves to another table. The individuals remain, but their relationship keeps taking another form. Notice the movement: an understanding becomes an expectation, and the expectation becomes something to which both now respond.

Look at the mountain. I stand before it and say, “What a beautiful mountain.” Have I taken beauty from the mountain? Has the mountain taken my understanding so that it can appear beautiful? You will say that is ridiculous. The mountain takes nothing from me. Exactly. It does not need my understanding in order to stand there.

Yet I name it. I recognize it. I call it beautiful, and now there is the mountain as it appears to me through what I know of it. Seeing the mountain is not the deception. Enjoying its beauty is not the deception. I am asking about the seeming exchange in which I imagine that I have taken something from it and given something to it in return. The mountain has taken neither my name for it nor my knowledge of it. It remains there while I speak. What, then, has happened between us?

Are you somebody today? Are you taking from reality that you are this, that you are that, and then living as though reality has taken your life in return, making you into what you have taken from it? “This is who I am.” There is the conclusion again. An experience has become an understanding, and the understanding has become an identity.

How do you surpass this attachment when even the attempt to surpass it can become another account of who you are? What is the illusion here? What is the appearing of this person I call myself? The past, my friend, enters this illusion too, doesn't it? Something happened, and now what I take from its having happened appears before me as the conclusion of who I am.

Look at discovery in the same way. I take an understanding from a discovery, and now I am the one who discovered it. The discovery has its place in my life, and I have my place in its telling. Are we looking for the discovery of discoveries? When does it end? When is enough? When can I stand before this taking and say that I need not take anything further in order to be?

What is truly necessary? What belongs to the needs of a life, and what belongs to the fear that without one more answer I will somehow be less? Whatever I take from reality as experience becomes part of the life I say I have lived. Then I return that understanding to reality as a statement of what reality is. I seem to become more of myself, and reality seems to become more of what I have understood. Yet why must either be made greater through this exchange? Why can we not simply be, without making every encounter into something that must be possessed?

Consider an injury. You are an individual, and you receive an injury. The injury is real and must be tended to. But what are you taking from it beyond the injury itself? And what do you then believe it has taken from you? Here, pain is taken from you and pain is taken from the injury. Pain may become an account of your whole life. That account may grow until it seems to name the whole person. There is the injury, and there is everything you have begun to understand yourself to be because of it. You are now in pain.

The discipline I am considering does not deny the injury or ask you to pretend there is no pain. It is the discipline of not making the injury the conclusion of who you are. You are a person who has been injured. That fact need not become the whole of you. Tend to what requires tending, and notice the further exchange: what you take from the injury as identity, and what you believe that identity has taken from your life.

Here we return to impermanence. If every encounter must become an answer, and every answer must tell me who I am, then I am continually establishing conclusions within time. Even “I have let go” can become a possession. Even “I understand the illusion” can become another place for the mind to remain. A mind that holds no conclusion does not have a conclusion of itself. It need not take this understanding and turn it into one more becoming.

You still live a life. The flowers appear, the dream unfolds, the cup is lifted, and the mountain stands before you. There are things to do and things to care for. But must every movement give you something by which to establish yourself? Must everything that passes between you and the world become a claim upon who you are?

And if someone says, “Chase, no one will ever understand what you are talking about,” I can answer, “I will not take that understanding from you.” I do not have to make their conclusion my own. Nor do I have to take the opposite conclusion and insist that everyone will understand. Either would give me another answer to possess. They have offered an understanding. I can hear it without accepting it as the measure of my life.

“This is ridiculous. This is all nonsense.” Again, I need not take that judgment and make it my identity. I need not surrender my judgment, and I need not make the other person surrender theirs. The offering does not have to become an exchange through which one of us grows greater and the other becomes less. I can leave it where it is offered, without reaching for another conclusion of myself: “I will not take that understanding from you.”